I have mixed feelings about this whole episode.
We do a lot of business with Dell - and yes, I realized that this was an error. I fully expected that the deal would be cancelled. But with an estimated shipment date of March 15, it was on March 14 that we got the phone call that our orders had been cancelled - a full three business days after we received the confirmation email. On the 13th morning we sold two systems to clients at a favorable price reflecting our cost in the pricing. Once we got the word that the deal had fallen through, we had to decide whether to back out of the sales to our clients. We decided that we would honor them and in the process ended up absorbing a loss of about $350 on both systems based on what we ultimately ended up paying for the two systems in relation to what we charged them. It was a business decision to take the loss rather than risk upsetting our clients.
My issue with Dell is that they should have made a more timely decision to cancel - two days elapsed between the time that they corrected the pricing problem and commenced the cancellation of the orders - in our case it was closer to three days since we were informed late morning on the 14th. My other issue is that simultaneous with the cancellation Dell should have offered a price break if people wanted to proceed with the order. I read somewhere that Dell would have lost $175 on each system if they had not cancelled. Whatever that number was, some sort of price adjustment would have been appropriate. Let's face it, there is blame enough to go all around. There are those - including yours truly - who took advantage of what was a pricing error on the one hand and ordered multiple systems and Dell who should have the systems in place to ensure that such snafus are corrected quickly and in a timely manner and when they do occur, that a mechanism is in place to do more than cancel orders en masse. After all, it appears that they ended up offering price adjustements but doing so on an individual basis - based on posts that others have made.
So, all in all, I think that they handled the issue badly. Having said this, I will also say that I am not one of the Dell-bashers who have posted on this thread - as I said we do a lot of business with them and anticipate continuing to do so. IMO, they are a quality outfit and despite the occasional lapses, we have been more than pleased with the service we receive. In our case, Dell has gone out of their way to grant exceptions in situations where they did not have to do so - for example, we have been allowed to return units well past the normal deadline.
We will write to Dell and express our views about how they mishandled this situation. I believe that constructive feedback is appropriate and welcomed by successful companies.